Escala Web Internet Marketing and seo resources » Website Traffic

How to do keyword research

Sylvia — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 13:04:10 +0000

Once you have found your niche and perhaps also the products you want to promote, you will need to continue with your keyword research.

Keyword research is important because you will want to rank high for keywords that people are searching for. There really is no point in ranking high for keywords that nobody types into search engines.

So how do you find the right keywords?

The first place I usually go is the Google keywords search tool at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Select the country you want to target and then type in the keywords phrase you were thinking of targeting or the topic of your website. Fill in the captcha code and press “get keyword ideas”.

Google will now let you know how many searches there have been for those words in that month. If you want to be even more specific then you can select “exact” in the match type drop down box. Some results that have come up for the phrase “content management system singapore” are: content management system has 246,000 globally and 165,000 in the united States but that is probably a too wide a keyword or too difficult to rank for.

Finding the right keyword combination that you can rank for

Try to look for other combinations that may be less competitive but still get a good amount of traffic.

Web content management system gets 27,000 us visits and web content management system gets 2,700. Cms website get 14,000 and web cms and cms system 22,000. Content manager software 40,500. Simple CMS 22,000.”content manager software” is much better with only 17,000 search results.

Find out which keywords your competitor is targeting

You can also find out which keywords your competitors are targeting. I’ve got PPC web spy installed in Firefox which lets me find out which keywords competitors are bidding for. Another tool is Keywordspy. Find out who is ranking high and which keywords they are using.

Find out how difficult it is to rank for those keywords

The next thing you want to do is to find out how difficult it is to rank for these keywords. Go into Google and do a search for each of the phrases that you just found. At the top of the screen you can read that CMS has about 142,000,000 results. Far too high and it will be extremely difficult to rank for the very general term in a short amount of time. Let’s narrow it down and put our phrase in quotations . This will make it an exact phrase and will give you better results.

Another tool to test the keyword difficulty is SEOLogs.com . They check all websites for these keywords in their title tag, anchors etc. If I type in “Content Manager software” it comes out as 66/100 which is still quite difficult. simple cms does better with 45/100. Anything below 40 will be relatively easy to rank for with anything between 40 – 60 achievable.

Target several phrases

Finding the right keywords will greatly improve your chances of being found in search engines. Of course you can target several combinations, especially when your website has multiple pages.

In upcoming posts we will go into more details on how to optimize your pages and all other aspects of SEO. There are also lots of good tips in our free course so don’t forget to sign up for that. (top right of the page).

How to get more traffic to your site?

Sylvia — Wed, 27 May 2009 04:51:00 +0000

The most important thing you can do for your website is to opimize it for search engines. If you can get your website listed on the frontpage for your targeted keywords you are sure to get a LOT of traffic to your site.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and it is essential for your website if you want to be found on the web.

Yet it seems to be a factor often overlooked by many websites. Although SEO is not important for everyone (A company like Nike is already known and people will know to just type in the website address) for many businesses search engine searches are a key method to generate new leads. It is basically free advertising.

What can you do for your in terms of SEO?

You can do some research as to what keywords are frequently searched on in your target area. Sometimes these keywords phrases are completely different from what you think people will search for when they want to find your business. You will need to make sure that you are targeting the right keywords. There is no point being number 1 for your keywords if noone searches for that particular phrase.
You need to determine with you which keywords you want to target. You can target different keywords phrases on each page of your website.
You will need to change some of the page titles (the titles that you will see at the top of your browser) so that they are more descriptive and will include your most important keywords. Page titles are crucially important for SEO and it is easy to do.
You can improve your meta tags for keywords
You can improve your meta tag desciption. This is the text that often appears in search engines when your website comes up in a search. It is important that it is both keyword rich but also encourages viewers to visit your site.
You can improve the keyword density within your text
You can analyze why your competitors are ranked higher than you. You can see which keywords they are targeting and which sites link to that website.
You can create links to your site. You can target the same links as your competitors but can add many more. Links to your site are an important factor for achieving the highest spots in the search engines
You can implement link generating strategies, like creating profiles in social media, writing articles for article directories, getting alerts of posts in your area and then commenting on those blog posts.
You can monitor that all is well with your website with Google’s webmaster tools and add redirects to pages if Google identifies page not found or other errors. You can also add a sitemap which makes it easy for Google to spider all pages of your website
You can add Google analytics to your site. This is the best analytics software on the web and it is free! It will give you very detailed information about the visitors of your site, where they can from and how long they stay on your site.
You should use your website effectively to get optimum results in Google and other search engines. For example you may consider adding a blog to your website. A blog keeps your website current and if you place a feed on the frontpage that page will be updated on a frequent basis. Google will pick up on the fact that your frontpage gets updated frequently and will keep coming back to your site to increase the pages that it indexes for your website.
Although this is not SEO you can also setup a google ad campaign. This will give you instant results. All your click throughs can be monitored through Analytics and as you can adjust your ads and campaigns as often as you like you are completely in control over how much you want to spend on advertising and which areas you want to target.

Good luck with optimizing your site and let me know if you need any help.

Welcome to Escala Web

Sylvia — Sat, 23 May 2009 00:46:28 +0000

Here you will learn how you too can create a website and start to earn money online. These are just some of the things that you will learn here:

How to setup a website
How to customize a website
How to monetize it
How to build up a newsletter subscriber list
How to market your website
How to do SEO
How to use social media
And lots more…..

Stay tune as we start filling this site with content!